Hello, Internets!

As promised, here's every take from my first feature film Chanthaly, plus the audio, plus the project files, plus a bunch of other goodies. This 550GB package includes everything I used to edit the film, so with my blessing, have at it.

In December of 2011, I sat down with a couple of my friends here in Laos. We'd passed a script through the Lao Department of Cinema censors, raised a little bit of money, and despite a pretty much total lack of experience, we sort of looked at each other shrugged and decided, what the hell? Let's make a movie.

Now there's a lot of rough edges in here. Outside of the 100 minutes that actually ended up in the film, there's another 23 hours that didn't. It was myself and three or four talented guys doing the work of an entire film crew often between the hours of 9 P.M. and 3 A.M. We laughed, and we fought. The power dropped again and again. The set flooded. We set things up wrong, realized it, and then set them up right. But this is a good inside look at how a dozen people in Laos somehow made the country's first horror film with a $500 camera, four lights, a couple rolls of gaffer tape, a refurbished Macbook Pro and moxie. Lots of moxie.

I edited the film in Adobe Premiere CS6 and finished the color in After Effects. Red Giant was generous enough to donate some plugins to the film: Colorista II, Denoiser II and Magic Bullet Looks. Between the limitations of the laptop and the 100ºF weather, I could only keep two or three minutes of the film open in Premiere at a time. So I put the film together in small pieces, did the primary color correction and then exported the sequence out as an image stream which I then took into After Effects to color. It'll make more sense when you start opening things up, I'm sure.

The short version of the story is, it's going to take a bit of work for you to piece together what we've done here. But the awesome thing is that somewhere inside this half terabyte of data, there's a movie. And the cool thing is, the movie I found in there might not be the one you find.

So here's what you have:

- 25 hours of footage shot on a Canon DSLR.
- 15 hours of audio recorded on a Zoom H4N.
- All the Premiere and After Effects project files, plus open source edit decision lists for those not using Adobe.
- Shooting Scripts in both Lao and English.
- Subtitles in Adobe Encore format.
- Poster Art with both English and Lao text (Photoshop)

I guess that's it. Have at it, and if you come up with anything cool, send me a message on Twitter (@mangosodium) or on the Chanthaly Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ChanthalyMovie). And hey, a sincere thank you to all of you who contributed to my Indiegogo campaign. Production on the next film starts in December 2014!

Sincerely,

- Mattie Do

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews